


Health Poultice

by Cryptographic_Delurk



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Darktown (Dragon Age), Karl is a terrible gossip, M/M, Not A Fix-It, it’s all unanswered questions and high levels of subjectivity, you're going to have to bring your thinking caps to this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:00:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23935729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cryptographic_Delurk/pseuds/Cryptographic_Delurk
Summary: Karl Thekla and Fenris might be the only two people outside the Darktown Clinic without hundred day cough, but it won’t stay that way for long.(Or Fenris and Karl make poultices and talk about Anders.)
Relationships: Fenris/Karl Thekla
Comments: 8
Kudos: 10





	Health Poultice

It was not the scene he expected to find, though maybe it should have been. Kirkwall’s undercity was a dank and unpleasant place on the best of days, and it was nearly oppressive on a day so hot and humid. Rainwater and whatever else it picked up from the Hightown streets dribbled down the sewer walls and collected in uneven puddles on the ground, quickly growing stagnant and ripe. And the mass of sweating coughing bodies overflowing from the clinic doors did nothing to help.

“You know, it’s probably catching.”

Fenris blinked out of his stupor, and turned to the voice. “What?”

“The cough,” the mage clarified. “It’s probably catching. So you should probably see to your business quickly and return some place you’re less likely to be infected.”

There was definitely a wisdom to this advice, but Fenris hesitated to take it. By all means he should leave. Even if he managed to fight the crowd to be allowed inside the clinic, the intermittent flashes of eerie blue light that emanated from its doors indicated he would have no desire to enter for quite some time. Instead, he studied the mage in front of him. He sat at a rickety worktable set up in front of the clinic, where a large bowl of herbs mashed to paste and a half-filled basket of poultices were displayed.

The mage was not the one Fenris had meant to run into. Not that Anders was good company by any stretch of the imagination, but Fenris had become inured to him over their various outings with Hawke. They had fallen into an easy pattern – Anders was reckless, petty, vindictive, and could be counted on to leave Fenris feeling on edge every moment of their shared company. This was in many ways preferable to Karl Thekla, with whom Fenris did not know how to act. Thekla was calm and congenial, wore his age with far more dignity than Anders, and these traits left Fenris struggling to not be lulled into a false sense of security.

This was apparent when Thekla scooted to the side and hefted a supply crate down next to him. “Or if you don’t plan on going anywhere, you might as well sit and keep me company.” And Fenris, in a display of astoundingly poor judgement, stepped to the other side of the table, and slid into the makeshift seat on top of the crate.

Thekla was absorbed in his work, and Fenris in studying the man and his process. Unlike Anders, Thekla did not seem intimidated by either the silence or scrutiny. But he apparently noticed Fenris’s watchful eyes and fiddling hands, because after a moment he wordlessly passed him a few of the torn strips of cloth he had stacked to the side.

Fenris knew very little about herbalism – a skill that nobody had seen fit to teach him in his time as a slave. But he was a quick study and, after watching Thekla weave together a couple more poultices – looking for how much filling he divvied to each wrap and how he tied the cloth together into an aesthetically pleasing bundle – Fenris decided to try his hand at it. Thekla was using an overlarge butter knife to scoop the herbal clay mixture from the bowl and smear it across the cloth, and when he set it back in the bowl in preparation for the next step, Fenris reached for it, wordlessly falling into the patterned gaps in his production process. Thekla waited patiently whenever Fenris ended up dallying with the knife, and let Fenris’s hand withdraw completely before reaching for it, so their hands never brushed against each other in passing. The consideration of it made Fenris’s cheeks heat more than any accidental touch could.

“So if you’re not here to buy medicine or get treated for hundred day cough, what brings you by?” Thekla finally asked, when the bowl of herbal mixture finally ran dry.

“I wasn’t aware you actually _sold_ medicine,” Fenris retorted. “In my understanding, you hand it out freely to any destitute waif that walks by.”

Thekla took Fenris’s attempt to redirect the conversation in stride. “We sell some of it,” he said. “Anders would disown me if I tried to charge all the starving mothers and orphans though.”

“Your mothers and orphans know it. They take advantage of you for it.”

“I’ve told Anders as much.” Thekla shrugged and appeared to dismiss it. “There are worse things in the world than being taken advantage of.” Thekla was rummaging through his supply crates, and pulled out different bushels – rosemary, elfroot, ginger root – showed them each to Fenris before refilling the bowl and mashing them with a stone mortar. “Anyhow, you’d be surprised – for every scoundrel there are a dozen honest people just waiting for the opportunity to show their generosity. Why just this afternoon someone volunteered to wrap poultices with me for no pay at all.”

Thekla was smiling, in a delightfully smug kind of way. And Fenris scowled, because he wouldn’t let Thekla or anyone think he didn’t know when he was being made fun of. But it was hard to be too upset when someone was paying you such a compliment. _Did Thekla really count him among the honest and generous of the world?_

“I am surprised your table is not being swarmed,” Fenris said, as conversationally as he could. “Are these people not sick and in need of medicine?”

“I had a pot of honey and mint set up for a while,” Thekla said. “To help soothe the throat and smother the cough. And willow bark for fever. But we’ve run out of both, and until I have a chance to gather more, I’m only stuck with busywork.” He pointed to the poultices. “These are only good as anti-inflammatories,” he described. “Although I hardly need to tell you how to apply a poultice.”

“Still, I would think they’d seek your counsel,” Fenris insisted. “You are a healer, are you not?”

“Not much of one,” Thekla said. “I’m not the Darktown Healer. And I’ve been kicked out of the clinic today.”

Fenris resisted the bait. “You must be,” he said. “You run the clinic while he’s running around with us. To the Wounded Coast. The Deep Roads. Sundermount.”

And it was a detail that should have been beneath Fenris’s notice. But it never had been. Partly because two escaped mages running a well visited clinic in what could scarcely be called obscurity seemed another sign that Kirkwall was not so far from the corruption many would claim it free of. And partly because, well, Fenris was jealous. Not on Thekla’s behalf in specific. But it seemed unfair that someone as flighty and volatile as Anders should have someone so steadfast and devoted, who would always welcome him home with a swept floor and lit lantern, when Fenris had to walk home to an empty mansion.

“I do what I can,” Thekla said. “I know some basic Creation spells. But I’m not like Anders. No one is like Anders.”

As if on cue, the entrance to the clinic flashed with another wave of eerie blue light. And Fenris had to bite the inside of his lip to keep from shuddering.

“It makes you uncomfortable,” Thekla said apologetically. “Magic does. I understand. He is uniquely and insanely talented. But I understand if it’s hard for you to see it.”

It wasn’t exactly that Fenris had ever denied that Anders was a powerful mage but- “He’s foolish. And dangerous.”

“We used to call him a terror,” Thekla laughed. “You’re not his favourite person either. I’m not blind enough to think he can’t be cruel about it.”

Fenris told himself it wasn’t about that. “He and I disagree on many things.” Fenris raised the pitch of his voice into something challenging. “If it was you I told magic was a blight, and the Circles a necessity of preventing the rise of a second Imperium?”

Thekla had picked up a suspiciously hot pot of mud, and was pouring some of it in with the mash of herbs on the table. “I don’t know,” he said, in a carefully neutral voice. “I might take it upon myself to deliver a strongly worded letter to your Hightown mansion a few days later.”

“I wouldn’t read it,” Fenris mumbled, though this was not strictly true. There was nothing to be gained from closing his ears and eyes to the rhetoric of his enemies. It wasn’t that he _would_ not read it. It was that he _could_ not.

Thekla replaced the pot of mud, and began stirring the bowl of herbs in earnest. “It’s probably just as well.” Thekla shrugged. “It wouldn’t be my best work. Would give you the wrong first impression of my literary genius.”

Fenris snorted, but found himself smiling in spite of himself. He quickly coughed and turned away. “Do you not share all your lover’s views then?”

“Oh, I share them. I am a staunch Libertarian, I’m afraid.” Thekla paused in his work, and seemed to consider something. “But I should probably note that Anders never was. He was always more concerned with _being free_ than the inertia of academic arguments on the subject.”

Before Fenris could process this, or work up the courage to admit he didn’t know much about academics, did not know what a ‘Libertarian’ was, Thekla spoke again.

“And he’s not my lover… Or he is? Was? We’re off-again at the moment,” he decided. “We had a fight and he’s not currently speaking to me. Which really says something, you know, given how little he likes the quiet.”

This was the second time Thekla had alluded to a personal disagreement between him and Anders. So it was clear he wished to talk about it. It made asking about the Circle look an attractive option by comparison. “You mentioned… _Libertarians_?”

“Advocates for the liberation of southern mages,” Thekla said, as if by rote. “We were outnumbered quite badly in the Fraternities. By the Aequitarians, mostly. Not by the Loyalists, but I think you might as well lump the two groups together for all their talk amounts to the same bottom line. At least the Isolationists and Lucrosians had something unique to say.” Thekla waved this off dismissively, before appearing to be distracted by some new contemplation. “You know, I never really expected to change anyone’s mind though. I didn’t entertain fantasies of what it would be like for the Libertarians to grab the majority vote, let alone what we’d do with it if we had it. It takes a certain kind of… arrogance, really, to be content to stand and debate knowing you’ll never change anyone’s mind, least of all your own. It wasn’t about justice, or trying to help anyone other than myself. I only said things true to how I saw them, because I needed some place I didn’t have to lie by omission.”

And there was nothing to say to that because- Fenris understood. Not all the junk about Fraternities and Circles and magic. But the need to say things, not to change the world, but to cement it. Because your thoughts and feelings and experiences weren’t real until you did. Like the long arduous process that had been convincing himself that the things Danarius did were wrong, that what had happened to Fenris was wrong, that Tevinter had been hell.

Thekla had finished with his mix of herbs. Fenris was not sure he was up for wrapping together another dozen or so poultices. But, neither, it seemed was Thekla. He sat back in his seat, and appeared to almost… sulk. And Fenris thought more about all the things that were not real, not until they spilled out in drunken conversations with Hawke, and he felt moved suddenly to indulge his conversation partner.

“You and Anders – what was your conflict about?”

Now with a willing audience, Thekla seemed only slightly short of delighted.

“Oh, lots of different things,” he feigned vague disinterest. “But really they’re all the same thing. Last week there were a few casualties too many, and he got upset when I told him we couldn’t save everyone. This week he was talking about how he wasn’t sure that joining with Justice was the right decision, and I said I had imagined he might come to think it a mistake.”

And this was why Fenris had resisted asking about the mages’ personal lives. He might have asked only out of a desire to be a polite conversationalist, but already he felt himself being drawn in.

“It was rather amusing how quickly Anders changed his tune once I said that,” Thekla continued. “He was rather livid with me for doubting them, that what the two of them could accomplish together had been worth anything less than the full price of the decisions they’d made.”

“Unbelievable,” Fenris scoffed, to hide that he was wide eyed with fear. Even now the abomination found justifications for what he’d done, for the demon he’d let into himself.

“Isn’t he?” Thekla agreed. Only he said it with something like starry-eyed admiration, so Fenris was sure they were not even remotely on the same page. “He told me he wasn’t sure why he’d gone through all the trouble to rescue me from the Circle, if I was only going to shrug my shoulders and surrender to my failures and doubt his every course of action.”

Fenris felt aghast in spite of himself. It did not do him good to find Anders capable of visiting the same type of cruel eviscerating words that he directed at Fenris at one of his own. “And what did you say?”

Thekla laughed. “I told him I wasn’t sure myself, but I imagined I looked far more dashing and daring and rebellious standing next to a bunch of cowed Circle mages than I do out here among champions and revolutionaries and mercenaries.”

“ _Fasta vass_! What a hypocrite he is! He speaks of freedom, of justice. But when you fail to use your freedom in the way he sees fit, you are no longer deserving of the help he gave to let you win it.”

“He didn’t mean it like that,” Thekla placated. “It was unkind and unfair. But he said it to make me angry, and is only worse off for it not having worked… He’ll apologise in a day or two, for his part. You have to understand he is no longer truly capable of being injust.”

Fenris thought that Thekla must have strange ideas about what it meant to be unjust, if this was his response. “You do not deserve that. He is unfair. Spiteful. A danger even to you.”

“You think so?” Thekla asked. “I’m quite proud of him, really. There was a time when he needed my coddling. When he was falling over himself just to hear me say that he _might_ not be wrong, that he _might_ not be imagining that he- that all of us- deserved better than we got. He’s matured well. He’s a stronger person now.”

“You deserve better than him,” Fenris insisted. And he was not sure when he had turned fully to face Karl Thekla and inched up to the edge of his seat. When he had grasped Karl’s forearm, and pulled on it like a plea.

“You know, I used to think that too. A long time ago back in Kinloch.” Thekla said, and his voice tinged with a strange curiosity for a second. “It just goes to show how much was kept from you, as well. How sheltered both our upbringings were.”

Fenris did not know what to say to this. It should have been- No, it _was_ insulting. When he barely had an upbringing to speak of. But all he felt was something like pity, or shame, or doubt. And something that caught in his throat and made his entire body hum with warm, nervous energy. So Fenris was grateful when Karl took away the need for words. He rearranged Fenris’s grip on his arm, pressed their hands together so the palms were touching, and leaned in to kiss him.

**Author's Note:**

> Anyhow, a week later Karl and Fenris both came down with pertussis and then Anders had to treat both of them while also dealing with the jealousies™ and it’s a mess. Everything is a mess. (Thank you for reading.)


End file.
